Pseudo-majestic, cubing every chance
Word that escapes the lip,
I write in a sort of trance,
I write these words out blindly, the scrivening hand
Attempting to outstrip
By a second the “how come?”
That at any moment might escape the lip,
The same lip of the writer,
And sail away into night, there to expand
By geometrical progress, und so weiter.
I write from an Empire whose enormous flanks
Extend beneath the sea. Having sampled two
Oceans as well as continents, I feel that I know
What the globe itself must feel : there’s nowhere to go.
Elsewhere is nothing more than a far-flung strew
Of stars, burning away.
Better to use a telescope to see
A snail self-sealed to the underside of a leaf.
I always used to regard “infinity”
As the art of splitting a liter into three
Equal components with a couple of friends
Without a drop left over. Not, through a lens,
An aggregate of miles without relief.
Night. A cuckoo wheezes in the Waldorf-
Inglorious. The legions close their ranks
And, leaning against cohorts, sleep upright.
Circuses pile against fora. High in the night
Above the bare blue-print of an empty court,
Like a lost tennis-ball, the moon regards its court,
A chess queen’s dream, spare, parqueted, formal and bright.
There’s no life without furniture.
VII
Only a corner cordoned off and laced
By dusty cobwebs may properly be called
Right-angled; only after the musketry of applause
And “bravos” does the actor rise from the dead;
Only when the fulcrum is solidly placed
Can a person lift, by Archimedian laws,
The weight of this world. And only that body whose weight
Is balanced at right angles to the floor
Can manage to walk about and navigate.
Stifling. There’s a cockroach mob in the stadium
Of the zinc washbasin, crowding around the old
Corpse of a dried-up sponge. Turning its crown,
A bronze faucet, like Caesar’s laureled head,
Deposes upon the living and the dead
A merciless column of water in which they drown.
The little bubble-beads inside my glass
Look like the holes in cheese.
No doubt that gravity holds sway,
Just as upon a solid mass,
Over such small transparencies as these.
And its accelerating waterfall
(Thirty-two feet per sec. per sec.) refracts
As does a ray of light in human clay.
Only the stacked, white china on the stove
Could look so much like a squashed, collapsed pagoda.
Space lends itself just to repeatable things,
Roses, for instance. If you see one alone,
You instantly see two. The bright corona,
The crimson petals abuzz, acrawl with wings
Of dragonflies, of wasps and bees with stings.
Stifling. Even the shadow on the wall,
Servile and weak as it is, still mimics the rise
Of the hand that wipes the forehead’s sweat. The smell
Of old body is even clearer now
Than body’s outline. Thought loses its defined
Edges, and the frazzled mind
Goes soft in its soup-bone skull. No one is here
To set the proper focus of your eyes.
VIII
Preserve these words against a time of cold,
A day of fear : Man survives like a fish,
Stranded, beached, but intent
On adapting itself to some deep, cellular wish,
Wriggling toward bushes, forming hinged leg-struts, then
To depart (leaving a track like the scrawl of a pen)
For the interior, the heart of the continent.
Full-breasted sphinxes there are, and lions winged
Like fanged and mythic birds.
Angels in white, as well, and nymphs of the sea.
To one who shoulders the vast obscurity
Of darkness and heavy heat (may one add, grief?)
Zeroes that ripple outwards from dropped words.
Even space itself, where there’s nowhere to sit down,
Declines, like a star in its ether, its cold sky.
Yet just because shoes exist and the foot is shod
Some surface will always be there, some place to stand,
A portion of dry land.
And its brinks and beaches will be enchanted by
The soft song of the cod:
“Time is far greater than space. Space is a thing.
Whereas time is, in essence, the thought, the conscious dream
Of a thing. And life itself is a variety
Of time. The carp and bream
Are its clots and distillates. As are even more stark
And elemental things, including the sea-
Wave and the firmament of the dry land.
Including death, that punctuation mark.
At times, in that chaos, that piling up of days,
The sound of a single word rings in the ear,
Some brief, syllabic cry,
Like ‘love,’ perhaps, or possibly merely ‘hi!’
But before I can make it out, static or haze
Trouble the scanning lines that undulate
And wave like the loosened ripples of your hair.”
IX
Man broods over his life like night above a lamp.
At certain moments a thought takes leave of one
Of the brain’s hemispheres, and slips, as a bedsheet might,
From under the restless sleeper’s body-clamp,
Revealing who-knows-what-under-the-sun.
Unquestionably, night
Is a bulky thing, but not so infinite
As to engross both lobes. By slow degrees
The africa of the brain, its europe, the asian mass of it,
As well as other prominences in its crowded seas,
Creaking on their axis, turn a wrinkled cheek
Toward the electric heron with its lightbulb of a beak.
Behold: Aladdin says “Sesame!” and presto! there’s a golden trove.
Caesar calls for his Brutus down the dark forum’s colonnades.
In the jade pavilion a nightingale serenades
The Mandarin on the delicate theme of love.
A young girl rocks a cradle in the lamp’s arena of light.
A naked Papuan leg keeps up a boogie-woogie beat.
Stifling. And so, cold knees tucked snug against the night,
It comes to you all at once, there in the bed,
That this is marriage. That beyond the customs sheds
Across dozens of borders there turns upon its side
A body you now share nothing with, unless
It be the ocean’s bottom, hidden from sight,
And the experience of nakedness.
Nevertheless, you won’t get up together.
Because, while it may be light way over there,
The dark still governs in your hemisphere.
One solar source has never been enough
To serve two average bodies, not since the time
God glued the world together in its prime.
The light has never been enough.
X
I notice a sleeve’s hem, as my eyes fall,
And an elbow bending itself. Coordinates show
My location as paradise, that sovereign, blessed
Place where all purpose and longing is
set at rest.
This is a planet without vistas, with no
Converging lines, with no prospects at all.
Touch the table-corner, touch the sharp nib of the pen
With your fingertip : you can tell such things could hurt.
And yet the paradise of the inert
Resides in pointedness;
Whereas in the lives of men
It is fleeting, a misty, mutable excess
That will not come again.
I find myself, as it were, on a mountain peak.
Beyond me there is … Chronos and thin air.
Preserve these words. The paradise men seek
Is a dead end, a worn-out, battered cape
Bent into crooked shape,
A cone, a finial cap, a steel ship’s bow
From which the lookout never shouts “Land Ho!”
All you can tell for certain is the time.
That said, there’s nothing left but to police
The revolving hands. The eye drowns silently
In the clock-face as in a broad, bottomless sea.
In paradise all clocks refuse to chime
For fear they might, in striking, disturb the peace.
Double all absences, multiply by two
Whatever’s missing, and you’ll have some clue
To what it’s like here. A number, in any case,
Is also a word and, as such, a device
Or gesture that melts away without a trace,
Like a small cube of ice.
XI
Great issues leave a trail of words behind,
Free-form as clouds of tree-tops, rigid as dates
Of the year. So too, decked out in a paper hat,
The body viewing the ocean. It is selfless, flat
As a mirror as it stands in the darkness there.
Upon its face, just as within its mind,
Nothing but spreading ripples anywhere.
Consisting of love, of dirty words, a blend
Of ashes, the fear of death, the fragile case
Of the bone, and the groin’s jeopardy, an erect
Body at sea-side is the foreskin of space,
Letting semen through. His cheek tear-silver-flecked,
Man juts forth into Time; man is his own end.
The Eastern end of the Empire dives into night—
Throat-high in darkness. The coil of the inner ear,
Like a snail’s helix, faithfully repeats
Spirals of words in which it seems to hear
A voice of its own, and this tends to incite
The vocal chords, but it doesn’t help you see.
In the realm of Time, no precipice creates
An echo’s formal, answering symmetry.
Stifling. Only when lying flat on your back
Can you launch, with a sigh, your dry speech toward those mute,
Infinite regions above. With a soft sigh.
But the thought of the land’s vastness, your own minute
Size in comparison, swings you forth and back
From wall to wall, like a cradle’s rock-a-bye.
Therefore, sleep well. Sweet dreams. Knit up that sleeve.
Sleep as those only do who have gone pee-pee.
Countries get snared in maps, never shake free
Of their net of latitudes. Don’t ask who’s there
If you think the door is creaking. Never believe
The person who might reply and claim he’s there.
XII
The door is creaking. A cod stands at the sill.
He asks for a drink, naturally, for God’s sake.
You can’t refuse a traveler a nip.
You indicate to him which road to take,
A winding highway, and wish him a good trip.
He takes his leave, but his identical
Twin has got a salesman’s foot in the door.
(The two fish are as duplicate as glasses.)
All night a school of them come visiting.
But people who make their homes along the shore
Know how to sleep, have learned how to ignore
The measured tread of these approaching masses.
Sleep. The land beyond you is not round.
It is merely long, with various dip and mound,
Its ups and downs. Far longer is the sea.
At times, like a wrinkled forehead, it displays
A rolling wave. And longer still than these
Is the strand of matching beads of countless days;
And nights; and beyond these, the blindfold mist,
Angels in paradise, demons down in hell.
And longer a hundredfold than all of this
Are the thoughts of life, the solitary thought
Of death. And ten times that, longer than all,
The queer, vertiginous thought of Nothingness.
But the eye can’t see that far. In fact, it must
Close down its lid to catch a glimpse of things.
Only this way—in sleep—can the eye adjust
To proper vision. Whatever may be in store,
For good or ill, in the dreams that such sleep brings
Depends on the sleeper. A cod stands at the door.
LAGOON
I
Down in the lobby three elderly women, bored,
Take up, with their knitting, the Passion of Our Lord
As the universe and the tiny realm
Of the pension “ Accademia,” side by side,
With TV blaring, sail into Christmastide,
A look out desk-clerk at the helm.
II
And a nameless lodger, a nobody, boards the boat,
A bottle of grappa concealed in his raincoat
As he gains his shadowy room, bereaved
Of memory, homeland, son, with only the noise
Of distant forests to grieve for his former joys,
If anyone is grieved.
III
Venetian churchbells, tea cups, mantle clocks,
Chime and confound themselves in this stale box
Of assorted lives. The brazen, coiled
Octopus-chandelier appears to be licking,
In a triptych mirror, bedsheet and mattress ticking,
Sodden with tears and passion-soiled.
IV
Blown by nightwinds, an Adriatic tide
Floods the canals, boats rock from side to side,
Moored cradles, and the humble bream,
Not ass and oxen, guards the rented bed
Where the windowblind above your sleeping head
Moves to the sea-star’s guiding beam.
V
So this is how we cope, putting out the heat
Of grappa with nightstand water, carving the meat
Of flounder instead of Christmas roast,
So that Thy earliest back-boned ancestor
Might feed and nourish us, O Savior,
This winter night on a damp coast.
VI
A Christmas without snow, tinsel or tree,
At the edge of a map-and-land corseted sea;
Having scuttled and sunk its scallop shell,
Concealing its face while flaunting its backside,
Time rises from the goddess’s frothy tide,
Yet changes nothing but clock-hand and bell.
VII
A drowning city, where suddenly the dry
Light of reason dissolves in the moisture of the eye;
Its winged lion, that can read and write,
Southern kin of northern Sphinxes of renown,
Won’t drop his book and holler, but calmly drown
In splinters of mirror, splashing light.
VIII
The gondola knocks against its moorings. Sound
Cancels itself, hearing and words are drowned,
As is that nation where among
Forests of hands the tyrant of the State
Is voted in, its
only candidate,
And spit goes ice-cold on the tongue.
IX
So let us place the left paw, sheathing its claws,
In the crook of the arm of the other one, because
This makes a hammer-and-sickle sign
With which to salute our era and bestow
A mute Up Yours Even Unto The Elbow
Upon the nightmares of our time.
X
The raincoated figure is settling into place
Where Sophia, Constance, Prudence, Faith and Grace
Lack futures, the only tense that is
Is present, where either a goyish or yiddish kiss
Tastes bitter, like the city, where footsteps fade
Invisibly along the colonnade,
XI
Trackless and blank as a gondola’s passage through
A water surface, smoothing out of view
The measured wrinkles of its path,
Unmarked as a broad “So long!” like the wide piazza’s space,
Or as a cramped “I love,” like the narrow alleyways,
Erased and without aftermath.
XII
Moldings and carvings, palaces and flights
Of stairs. Look up : the lion smiles from heights
Of a tower wrapped as in a coat
Of wind, unbudged, determined not to yield,
Like a rank weed at the edge of a plowed field,
And girdled round by Time’s deep moat.
XIII
Night in St. Mark’s piazza. A face as creased
As a finger from its fettering ring released,
Biting a nail, is gazing high
Into that nowhere of pure thought, where sight
Is baffled by the bandages of night,
Serene, beyond the naked eye,